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<h2><b>Tom
Dispatch</b></h2><font size=1>
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175080/alfred_mccoy_back_to_the_future_in_torture_policy" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175080/alfred_mccoy_back_to_the_future_in_torture_policy<br>
</a></font><font size=3>posted 2009-06-07 17:32:55<br><br>
</font><h1><b>Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Back to the Future in Torture
Policy</b></h1><font size=3>When the
<a href="http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444">Abu Ghraib
photos</a> were released in 2004, it seemed that most Americans were
shocked by such novel and horrific images, but at least one was not. I'm
talking about Alfred McCoy, who had been following the Central
Intelligence Agency since the early 1970s, when it unsuccessfully tried
to stop the publication of his book, <i>The Politics of Heroin: CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade</i>. <br><br>
As soon as McCoy saw the now grimly iconic images of hooded figures,
naked men on leashes, and the like, his reaction -- even grimmer than
that of the rest of us -- was recognition. He had long been studying the
CIA's pioneering research into methods of psychological torture. (The
Agency had embarked on this project in the early 1950s, initially
studying old Soviet and Chinese methods of interrogating and breaking
prisoners.) As a result, he knew that what was unique at Abu Ghraib was
not the methods of abuse, but those images. Thanks to cell phones and
computers, these could be taken in quantity and passed around by anyone
in the vicinity. Those photos, he also knew, were no record of
aberrations: they represented policy and were recognizably out of the
CIA's several-decade-old torture playbook. <br><br>
That this was so still remains little understood today, even though in
2006 McCoy published an important book,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
A Question of Torture</a>, on the subject (and even earlier wrote a
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/%20alfred_mccoy_on_the_cia_s_road_to_abu_ghraib">
post</a> at TomDispatch laying out some of this grim history). His work
has since been incorporated into, for instance, Jane Mayer's
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307456293/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The Dark Side</a>, a striking account of the war on terror as a torture
fest. Yet the history offered in his book remains largely ignored or
missing-in-action in our world -- and without it much of the so-called
torture debate of this moment makes less sense than it should. <br><br>
Recently, McCoy read a front-page <i>New York Times</i> piece headlined
"U.S. Relies More on Aid of Allies in Terror Cases," which
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html">began this
way</a>: "The United States is now relying heavily on foreign
intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the
highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq
and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government
officials." <br><br>
Again, McCoy quickly recognized ancient history returning to haunt us.
After all, until the Bush era, American administrations regularly
outsourced torture (and torture techniques) to foreign allies. So read
his latest piece of missing history below and then, if you want to grasp
the depths of this old story, which shows no sign of ending, get your
hands on a copy of his book. (To catch a superb TomDispatch audio
interview with McCoy in which he discusses the CIA's "Manhattan
Project of the mind," click
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/">here</a>.) <i>Tom</i>
<br><br>
<br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd><h2><b>Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze</b></h2>
<dd><font size=3>America's Political Paralysis Over Torture<br>
</b>
<dd>By Alfred W. McCoy <br><br>
<dd>If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not
just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but
experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu</i> these days. With the
departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the
arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes
to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a
return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of
both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years. <br><br>
<dd>Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto Pinochet or the
Philippines after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington after
Bush is now trapped in the painful politics of impunity. Unlike anything
our allies have experienced, however, for Washington, and so for the rest
of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit. <br><br>
<dd>Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five years since the
<a href="http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444">Abu Ghraib
photos</a> first exposed our abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture
scandal continues to spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it,
including now Obama himself. By embracing a specific methodology of
torture, covertly developed by the CIA over decades using countless
millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically revealed in those Iraqi
prison photos, we have condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever
promises might be made to end this sort of abuse and are instead already
returning to a bipartisan consensus that made torture America's secret
weapon throughout the Cold War. <br><br>
<dd>Despite the 24</i> version of events, the Bush administration did not
simply authorize traditional, bare-knuckle torture. What it did do was
develop to new heights the world's most advanced form of psychological
torture, while quickly recognizing the legal dangers in doing so. Even in
the desperate days right after 9/11, the White House and Justice
Department lawyers who presided over the Bush administration's new
torture program were remarkably punctilious about cloaking their
decisions in legalisms designed to preempt later prosecution. <br><br>
<dd>To most Americans, whether they supported the Bush administration
torture policy or opposed it, all of this seemed shocking and very new.
Not so, unfortunately. Concealed from Congress and the public, the CIA
had spent the previous half-century developing and propagating a
sophisticated form of psychological torture meant to defy investigation,
prosecution, or prohibition -- and so far it has proved remarkably
successful on all these counts. Even now, since many of the leading
psychologists who worked to advance the CIA's torture skills have
remained silent, we understand surprisingly little about the
psychopathology of the program of mental torture that the Bush
administration applied so globally. <br><br>
<dd>Physical torture is a relatively straightforward matter of sadism
that leaves behind broken bodies, useless information, and clear evidence
for prosecution. Psychological torture, on the other hand, is a mind maze
that can destroy its victims, even while entrapping its perpetrators in
an illusory, almost erotic, sense of empowerment. When applied
skillfully, it leaves few scars for investigators who might restrain this
seductive impulse. However, despite all the myths of these last years,
psychological torture, like its physical counterpart, has proven an
ineffective, even counterproductive, method for extracting useful
information from prisoners. <br><br>
<dd>Where it has had a powerful effect is on those ordering and
delivering it. With their egos inflated beyond imagining by a sense of
being masters of life and death, pain and pleasure, its perpetrators,
when in office, became forceful proponents of abuse, striding across the
political landscape like Nietzschean supermen. After their fall from
power, they have continued to maneuver with extraordinary determination
to escape the legal consequences of their actions. <br><br>
<dd>Before we head deeper into the hidden history of the CIA's
psychological torture program, however, we need to rid ourselves of the
idea that this sort of torture is somehow "torture lite" or
merely, as the Bush administration renamed it, "enhanced
interrogation." Although seemingly less brutal than physical
methods, psychological torture actually inflicts a crippling trauma on
its victims. "Ill treatment during captivity, such as psychological
manipulations and forced stress positions," Dr. Metin Basoglu
<a href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/64611.php">has
reported</a> in the Archives of General Psychiatry</i> after interviewing
279 Bosnian victims of such methods, "does not seem to be
substantially different from physical torture in terms of the severity of
mental suffering." <br><br>
<dd>A Secret History of Psychological Torture</b> <br><br>
<dd>The roots of our present paralysis over what to do about detainee
abuse lie in the hidden history of the CIA's program of psychological
torture. Early in the Cold War, panicked that the Soviets had somehow
cracked the code of human consciousness, the Agency mounted a
"Special Interrogation Program" whose working hypothesis was:
"Medical science, particularly psychiatry and psychotherapy, has
developed various techniques by means of which some external control can
be imposed on the mind/or will of an individual, such as drugs, hypnosis,
electric shock and neurosurgery." <br><br>
<dd>All of these methods were tested by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s.
None proved successful for breaking potential enemies or obtaining
reliable information. Beyond these ultimately unsuccessful methods,
however, the Agency also explored a behavioral approach to cracking that
"code." In 1951, in collaboration with British and Canadian
defense scientists, the Agency encouraged academic research into
"methods concerned in psychological coercion." Within months,
the Agency had defined the aims of its top-secret program, code-named
<a href="http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book1/html/ChurchB1_0198a.htm">
Project Artichoke</a>, as the "development of any method by which we
can get information from a person against his will and without his
knowledge." <br><br>
<dd>This secret research produced two discoveries central to the CIA's
more recent psychological paradigm. In classified experiments, famed
Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb found that he could induce a state akin
to drug-induced hallucinations and psychosis in just 48 hours -- without
drugs, hypnosis, or electric shock. Instead, for two days student
volunteers at McGill University simply sat in a comfortable cubicle
deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and earmuffs.
"It scared the hell out of us," Hebb said later, "to see
how completely dependent the mind is on a close connection with the
ordinary sensory environment, and how disorganizing to be cut off from
that support." <br><br>
<dd>During the 1950s, two neurologists at Cornell Medical Center, under
CIA contract, found that the most devastating torture technique of the
Soviet secret police, the KGB, was simply to force a victim to stand for
days while the legs swelled, the skin erupted in suppurating lesions, and
hallucinations began -- a procedure which we now politely refer to as
"stress positions." <br><br>
<dd>Four years into this project, there was a sudden upsurge of interest
in using mind control techniques defensively after American prisoners in
North Korea suffered what was then called "brainwashing." In
August 1955, President Eisenhower
<a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=59249">
ordered</a> that any soldier at risk of capture should be given
"specific training and instruction designed to... withstand all
enemy efforts against him." <br><br>
<dd>Consequently, the Air Force developed a program it dubbed SERE
(Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to train pilots in resisting
psychological torture. In other words, two intertwined strands of
research into torture methods were being explored and developed:
aggressive methods for breaking enemy agents and defensive methods for
training Americans to resist enemy inquisitors. <br><br>
<dd>In 1963, the CIA distilled its decade of research into the curiously
named
<a href="http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm">
KUBARK</a> Counter-intelligence Interrogation manual, which stated
definitively that sensory deprivation was effective because it made
"the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure...
strengthening... the subject's tendencies toward compliance."
Refined through years of practice on actual human beings, the CIA's
psychological paradigm now relies on a mix of sensory overload and
deprivation via seemingly banal procedures: the extreme application of
heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence, feast and famine -- all
meant to attack six essential sensory pathways into the human mind.
<br><br>
<dd>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
<img src="http://www.nationinstitute.org/pdf/mccoycover.gif" alt="[]"></a>
After codifying its new interrogation methods in the KUBARK manual, the
Agency spent the next 30 years promoting these torture techniques within
the U.S. intelligence community and among anti-communist allies. In its
clandestine journey across continents and decades, the CIA's
psychological torture paradigm would prove elusive, adaptable,
devastatingly destructive, and powerfully seductive. So darkly seductive
is torture's appeal that these seemingly scientific methods, even when
intended for a few Soviet spies or al-Qaeda terrorists, soon spread
uncontrollably in two directions -- toward the torture of the many and
into a paroxysm of brutality towards specific individuals. During the
Vietnam War, when the CIA applied these techniques in their search for
information on top Vietcong cadre, the interrogation effort soon
degenerated into the crude physical brutality of the Phoenix Program,
producing 46,000 extrajudicial executions and little actionable
intelligence. <br><br>
<dd>In 1994, with the Cold War over, Washington ratified the
<a href="http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm">U.N. Convention
Against Torture</a>, seemingly resolving the tension between its
anti-torture principles and its torture practices. Yet when President
Clinton sent this Convention to Congress, he included four little-noticed
diplomatic "reservations" drafted six years before by the
Reagan administration and focused on just one word in those 26 printed
pages: "mental." <br><br>
<dd>These reservations narrowed (just for the United States) the
definition of "mental" torture to include just four acts: the
infliction of physical pain, the use of drugs, death threats, or threats
to harm another. Excluded were methods such as sensory deprivation and
self-inflicted pain, the very techniques the CIA had propagated for the
past 40 years. This definition was
<a href="http://law.justia.com/us/codes/title18/18usc2340.html">
reproduced verbatim</a> in Section 2340 of the U.S. Federal Code and
later in the
<a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002441----000-.html">
War Crimes Act of 1996</a>. Through this legal legerdemain, Washington
managed to agree, via the U.N. Convention, to ban physical abuse even
while exempting the CIA from the U.N.'s prohibition on psychological
torture. <br><br>
<dd>This little noticed exemption was left buried in those documents like
a landmine and would detonate with phenomenal force just 10 years later
at Abu Ghraib prison. <br><br>
<dd>War on Terror, War of Torture</b> <br><br>
<dd>Right after his public address to a shaken nation on September 11,
2001, President Bush
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A30216-2004Mar27">
gave his staff</a> secret orders to pursue torture policies, adding
emphatically, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we
are going to kick some ass." In a dramatic break with past policy,
the White House would even allow the CIA to operate its own global
network of prisons, as well as charter air fleet to transport seized
suspects and "render" them for endless detention in a
supranational gulag of secret "black sites" from Thailand to
Poland. <br><br>
<dd>The Bush administration also officially allowed the CIA ten
"enhanced" interrogation methods designed by agency
psychologists, including "waterboarding." This use of cold
water to block breathing triggers the "mammalian diving
reflex,"
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammalian_diving_reflex">
hardwired</a> into every human brain, thus inducing an uncontrollable
terror of impending death. <br><br>
<dd>As Jane Mayer
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer">
reported</a> in the New Yorker</i>, psychologists working for both the
Pentagon and the CIA "reverse engineered" the military's SERE
training, which included a brief exposure to waterboarding, and flipped
these defensive methods for use offensively on al-Qaeda captives.
"They sought to render the detainees vulnerable -- to break down all
of their senses," one official told Mayer. "It takes a
psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing
experiences." Inside Agency headquarters, there was, moreover, a
"high level of anxiety" about the possibility of future
prosecutions for methods officials knew to be internationally defined as
torture. The presence of Ph.D. psychologists was considered one "way
for CIA officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against
Torture." <br><br>
<dd>From recently
<a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/policy/national/olc_050510_bradbury_20pg.htm">
released</a> Justice Department memos, we now know that the CIA refined
its psychological paradigm significantly under Bush. As described in the
classified 2004 Background Paper on the CIA's Combined Use of
Interrogation Techniques</i>, each detainee was transported to an Agency
black site while "deprived of sight and sound through the use of
blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods." Once inside the prison, he was
reduced to "a baseline, dependent state" through conditioning
by "nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling...), and dietary
manipulation." <br><br>
<dd>For "more physical and psychological stress," CIA
interrogators used coercive measures such as "an insult slap or
abdominal slap" and then "walling," slamming the
detainee's head against a cell wall. If these failed to produce the
results sought, interrogators escalated to waterboarding, as was done to
Abu Zubaydah "at least 83 times during August 2002" and Khalid
Sheikh Mohammad 183 times in March 2003 -- so many times, in fact, that
the repetitiousness of the act can only be considered convincing
testimony to the seductive sadism of CIA-style torture. <br><br>
<dd>In a parallel effort launched by Bush-appointed civilians in the
Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave General Geoffrey
Miller command of the new American military prison at Guantanamo in late
2002 with ample authority to transform it into an ad hoc</i> psychology
lab. Behavioral Science Consultation Teams of military psychologists
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/marks">probed
detainees</a> for individual phobias like fear of the dark. Interrogators
stiffened the psychological assault by exploiting what they saw as Arab
cultural sensitivities when it came to sex and dogs. Via a three-phase
attack on the senses, on culture, and on the individual psyche,
interrogators at Guantanamo perfected the CIA's psychological paradigm.
<br><br>
<dd>After General Miller visited Iraq in September 2003, the U.S.
commander there, General Ricardo Sanchez, ordered Guantanamo-style abuse
at Abu Ghraib prison. My own review of the 1,600 still-classified photos
taken by American guards at Abu Ghraib -- which journalists covering this
story seem to share like Napster downloads -- reveals not random,
idiosyncratic acts by "bad apples," but the repeated, constant
use of just three psychological techniques: hooding for sensory
deprivation, shackling for self-inflicted pain, and (to exploit Arab
cultural sensitivities) both nudity and dogs. It is no accident that
Private Lynndie England was famously photographed leading an Iraqi
detainee leashed like a dog. <br><br>
<dd>These techniques,
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html">
according to</a> the New York Times</i>, then escalated virally at five
Special Operations field interrogation centers where detainees were
subjected to extreme sensory deprivation, beating, burning, electric
shock, and waterboarding. Among the thousand soldiers in these units, 34
were later convicted of abuse and many more escaped prosecution only
because records were officially "lost." <br><br>
<dd>"Behind the Green Door" at the White House</b> <br><br>
<dd>Further up the chain of command,
<a href="http://www.democrats.com/senate-armed-services-committee-report-on-torture">
National Security Advisor</a> Condoleezza Rice, as she recently told the
Senate, "convened a series of meetings of NSC [National Security
Council] principals in 2002 and 2003 to discuss various issues… relating
to detainees." This group, including Vice President Cheney, Attorney
General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and CIA director
George Tenet, met dozens of times inside the White House Situation Room.
<br><br>
<dd>After watching CIA operatives mime what Rice called "certain
physical and psychological interrogation techniques," these leaders,
their imaginations stimulated by graphic visions of human suffering,
repeatedly authorized extreme psychological techniques stiffened by
hitting, walling, and waterboarding. According to an April 2008 ABC
News</i> report, Attorney General Ashcroft once
<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4583256">interrupted</a> this
collective fantasy by asking aloud, "Why are we talking about this
in the White House? History will not judge this kindly." <br><br>
<dd>In mid-2004, even after the Abu Ghraib photos were released, these
principals met to approve the use of CIA torture techniques on still more
detainees. Despite mounting concerns about the damage torture was doing
to America's standing, shared by Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice commanded
Agency officials with the cool demeanor of a dominatrix. "This is
your baby," she reportedly said. "Go do it." <br><br>
<dd>Cleansing Torture</b> <br><br>
<dd>Even as they exercise extraordinary power over others, perpetrators
of torture around the world are assiduous in trying to cover their
tracks. They construct recondite legal justifications, destroy records of
actual torture, and paper the files with spurious claims of success.
Hence, the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes, while Vice
President Cheney now
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,524237,00.html">berates
Obama</a> incessantly (five times in his latest Fox News interview) to
declassify "two reports" which he claims will show the
informational gains that torture offered -- possibly because his staff
salted the files at the NSC or the CIA with documents prepared for this
very purpose. <br><br>
<dd>Not only were Justice Department lawyers aggressive in their advocacy
of torture in the Bush years, they were meticulous from the start, in
laying the legal groundwork for later impunity. In three torture memos
from May 2005 that the Obama administration recently
<a href="http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html">released</a>
, Bush's Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury repeatedly
cited those original U.S. diplomatic "reservations" to the U.N.
Convention Against Torture, replicated in Section 2340 of the Federal
code, to argue that waterboarding was perfectly legal since the
"technique is not physically painful." Anyway, he added,
careful lawyering at Justice and the CIA had punched loopholes in both
the U.N. Convention and U.S. law so wide that these Agency techniques
were "unlikely to be subject to judicial inquiry." <br><br>
<dd>Just to be safe, when Vice President Cheney presided over the
drafting of the
<a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/154/2006/en">
Military Commissions Act of 2006</a>, he included clauses, buried in 38
pages of dense print, defining "serious physical pain" as the
"significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member,
organ, or mental faculty." This was a striking paraphrase of the
outrageous definition of physical torture as pain "equivalent in
intensity to... organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even
death" in
<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=jay+bybee+torture+memorandum&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=">
John Yoo's infamous</a> August 2002 "torture memo," already
repudiated by the Justice Department. <br><br>
<dd>Above all, the Military Commissions Act protected the CIA's use of
psychological torture by repeating verbatim the exculpatory language
found in those Clinton-era, Reagan-created reservations to the U.N.
Convention and still embedded in Section 2340 of the Federal code. To
make doubly sure, the act also made these definitions retroactive to
November 1997, giving CIA interrogators immunity from any misdeeds under
the Expanded War Crimes Act of 1997 which punishes serious violations
with life imprisonment or death. <br><br>
<dd>No matter how twisted the process, impunity -- whether in England,
Indonesia, or America -- usually passes through three stages: <br><br>
<dd>1. Blame the supposed "bad apples." <br><br>
<dd>2. Invoke the security argument. ("It protected us.")
<br><br>
<dd>3. Appeal to national unity. ("We need to move forward
together.") <br><br>
<dd>For a year after the Abu Ghraib exposé, Rumsfeld's Pentagon blamed
various low-ranking bad apples by
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1795/alfred_mccoy_on_the_cia_s_road_to_abu_ghraib">
claiming</a> the abuse was "perpetrated by a small number of U.S.
military." In his statement on May 13th, while refusing to release
more torture photos, President Obama
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/politics/14photos.html">
echoed Rumsfeld</a>, claiming the abuse in these latest images, too,
"was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals."
<br><br>
<dd>In recent weeks, Republicans have taken us deep into the second stage
with
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney23-2009may23,0,2634231.story?track=rss">
Cheney's statements</a> that the CIA's methods "prevented the
violent deaths of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of
people." <br><br>
<dd>Then, on April 16th, President Obama brought us to the final stage
when he released the four Bush-era memos detailing CIA torture,
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Statement-of-President-Barack-Obama-on-Release-of-OLC-Memos/">
insisting</a>: "Nothing will be gained by spending our time and
energy laying blame for the past." During a visit to CIA
headquarters four days later, Obama
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21intel.html">
promised</a> that there would be no prosecutions of Agency employees.
"We've made some mistakes," he admitted, but urged Americans
simply to "acknowledge them and then move forward." The
president's statements were in such blatant defiance of international law
that the U.N.'s chief official on torture, Manfred Nowak, reminded him
that Washington was actually obliged to investigate possible violations
of the Convention Against Torture. <br><br>
<dd>This process of impunity is leading Washington back to a global
torture policy that, during the Cold War, was bipartisan in nature:
publicly advocating human rights while covertly outsourcing torture to
allied governments and their intelligence agencies. In retrospect, it may
become ever more apparent that the real aberration of the Bush years lay
not in torture policies per se</i>, but in the President's order that the
CIA should operate its own torture prisons. The advantage of the
bipartisan torture consensus of the Cold War era was, of course, that it
did a remarkably good job most of the time of insulating Washington from
the taint of torture, which was sometimes remarkably widely practiced.
<br><br>
<dd>There are already some clear signs of a policy shift in this
direction in the Obama era. Since mid-2008, U.S. intelligence has
captured a half-dozen al-Qaeda suspects and, instead of shipping them to
Guantanamo or to CIA secret prisons, has
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html">had them
interrogated</a> by allied Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. Showing
that this policy is again bipartisan, Obama's new CIA director Leon
Panetta
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/us/politics/18policy.html">
announced</a> that the Agency would continue to engage in the rendition
of terror suspects to allies like Libya, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia where
we can, as he
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/24intel.html">put
it</a>, "rely on diplomatic assurances of good treatment."
Showing the quality of such treatment, Time</i> magazine
<a href="http://mideast.blogs.time.com/2009/05/24/who-killed-ibn-al-sheikh-al-libi/">
reported</a> on May 24th that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who famously
confessed under torture that Saddam Hussein had provided al-Qaeda with
chemical weapons and later admitted his lie to Senate investigators, had
committed "suicide" in a Libyan cell. <br><br>
<dd>The Price of Impunity</b> <br><br>
<dd>This time around, however, a long-distance torture policy may not
provide the same insulation as in the past for Washington. Any retreat
into torture by remote-control is, in fact, only likely to produce the
next scandal that will do yet more damage to America's international
standing. <br><br>
<dd>Over a 40-year period, Americans have found themselves mired in this
same moral quagmire on six separate occasions: following exposés of
CIA-sponsored torture in South Vietnam (1970), Brazil (1974), Iran
(1978), Honduras (1988), and then throughout Latin America (1997). After
each exposé, the public's shock soon faded, allowing the Agency to resume
its dirty work in the shadows. <br><br>
<dd>Unless some formal inquiry is convened to look into a sordid history
that reached its depths in the Bush era, and so begins to break this
cycle of deceit, exposé, and paralysis followed by more of the same,
we're likely, a few years hence, to find ourselves right back where we
are now. We'll be confronted with the next American torture scandal from
some future iconic dungeon, part of a dismal, ever lengthening procession
that has led from the tiger cages of South Vietnam through the Shah of
Iran's prison cells in Tehran to Abu Ghraib and the prison at Bagram Air
Base in Afghanistan. <br><br>
<dd>The next time, however, the world will not have forgotten those
photos from Abu Ghraib. The next time, the damage to this country will be
nothing short of devastating. <br><br>
<dd>Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror</a> (Metropolitan Books), which is also available in Italian and
German translations. Later this year, Policing America's Empire: The
United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance
State</b>, a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of
overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security
measures here at home. To catch a TomDispatch audio interview in which
McCoy discusses the CIA's "Manhattan Project of the mind,"
click <a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/">here</a>. <br><br>
</i>
</dl>Copyright 2009 Alfred W. McCoy <br><br>
<br><br>
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